Now we know that American, homegrown, Chechen nationals Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were behind the Boston Marathon bombing.

Remember, the Chechen Islamic terrorists and their war with Russia? They were behind the school massacre in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September, 2004. Some 380 persons died, including 186 children.

A few years ago I visited Krasnodar where the issues of North Ossetia are still fresh in people’s minds. After the three-day siege in Beslan one of the school teachers who escaped told her harrowing story on French television. She had been inside the school when the Islamic terrorists wrapped their explosives around the small children.

“How can you justify the killing of children?” she asked one of the terrorists.

“The little girls will grow up to be prostitutes,” he answered, “And the little boys will grow up to be pimps, anyway, so what difference does it make?”

People in the West find it difficult to understand the Islamic mentality of many living in the former Soviet Republics. While the communists had crushed Christianity, Islam remained much more resilient.

During my visits to Kazan, Almaty, Astana and other such places I met Muslims who had practiced their faith all through the Soviet era. Others returned to Islam in mass, as soon as the Iron Curtain lifted, just as many in Ukraine and other Republics became instant Christians. It was as if a light switch were turned on. As if their faith were in the DNA and they returned to where they had been before Lenin.

A close Muslim friend of mine told of a young Kazakhstan female student attending Northwestern University. It was learned that during her time in American she had visited a Christian church with some classmates. Upon her return to her Islamic home she was kidnapped by radicals, raped and tortured for several days and then murdered. My friend said he had attended the funeral.

I am president of Canyonville Christian Academy, a boarding school in Oregon. We have had Islamic parents urge us to keep their children out of the chapel, even for secular events, for fear of retaliation when they return home.

Our ignorance of Islamic culture and thinking persists years after 9/11 because the American media simply does not want to know. The American media continue to try to force the world and its news into its own mold of what it wishes it to be. Objective reporting of facts is dead. The trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell is ignored. His mass murders are excused by the media, washed clean by his work as an abortionist.

Wars in Africa are reported, with numbers of those killed, while any explanation for what motivates the killers, including any ties to Islam or the victim’s ties to Christianity is censored. It is as if the news is embarrassed by the whole idea of Islamic radicalism and refuses to recognize that it exists.

This collapse of journalism in America sometimes leaves giant holes in our understanding of events. This became clear as newsmakers struggled to understand the motives and the Boston Marathon bombers. First they learned that they were Chechen, which absolutely dumbfounded the news anchors. ”I thought the Chechens were mad at the Russians,” one news reporter asked aloud.

Several hours into the coverage someone ventured that Chechens were Islamic. ”Could that have something to do with it? How could young men be living here in America and been turned to terrorism? Who could have turned them?”

“Poor George,” Ann Smiley, “told her husband, the cuckolded spy for the British Secret Service, “Life is such a puzzle for you, isn’t it?”

One could just as easily say, “Poor America, life is such a puzzle for you.”

The puzzle exists because of the massive denial and outright ignorance of the national media. A refusal of news companies to let their reporters report. Rather a desire to shape the news and force it into preconceived opinions of what it should be. This ignorance, passed onto the public, leaves us vulnerable to the possibility of terror all around us. And bewildered, puzzled, by our enemies.

Doug Wead is a presidential historian who served as a senior adviser to the Ron Paul presidential campaign. He is a New York Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and adviser to two presidents, including President George H.W. Bush. Read more reports from Doug Wead — Click Here Now.